The blog post and article frequency on this website has strongly declined over the last months. What's wrong, have we lost interest in the hobby? No, don't worry. We will continue to do background research, we will publish our results and improve our equipment. And you might still visit us on the occasional Viking Events, as can be seen in the calendar updates.
However, we do have another, more or less "normal" life as well, and this life has grabbed our attention quite a bit. Most of our resources went into looking for a new place to stay. It will be in this spring that we'll move into a sweet little house in the middle of Schleswig-Holstein. Instead of having to drive some seven hours to reach Hedeby, we will then need only half an hour or so. And all the Scandinavian markets will be much closer as well. The number of events that we will go to will be reduced to some degree, however.
Looking back at last year, we did visit quite a lot of markets, though. We went to more events in that year than in any year before, some of them in countries we haven't gone to for Viking Events so far. The Archeon in the Netherlands - Hafnarfjörður in Iceland - Nynäshamn in Sweden - Lejre was a new one, too, as well as the Burgmannentage in Vechta. During Trelleborg, Moesgård and (partially) Ribe, we joined with our friends Ylgja and Gisli and their cute doggy Isolde. This was quite an experience for us, since we are now used to manage our camp as a two-people-team. However, we did try out this constellation at the Archeon, just to be sure, because you never know if you can stand each other during a longer period of time with little (personal as well as physical) space in the camp, no matter how much you like each other in everyday life.
Since this winter we are busy moving to Northern Germany, there will be less things to buy at our camp next market season. Also, we want to grow smaller in general while increasing the overall quality (following a trend you can see among many good reenactors - often less is more). During this process, our entire camp, most of all the tent surrounding it, will be smaller in the future. There are mostly practical reasons behind it. Firstly, it's easier stuffing less fabric into your car. Secondly, setting up camp goes much faster. Thirdly, it's easier to squeeze oneself between other tents on a larger event. Fourthly, it's cheaper - we'll have to replace the fabric because moths as well as the intense sun beating down on it during the last two summers has weakened the fabric to such a degree that during the rain storm in Ribe this year, it just rained through. That sucked.
So as you can see, we will still be busy doing all this Viking Living History stuff. We're not planning on being idle. So check out this website from time to time!
